There’s one thing this dispute symbolizes, aside from the ongoing (and long-running) battle for the soul of the modern Republican Party. And that is this: Many or even most of the people who make a living working in politics and political commentary—even those who think of themselves as outsiders, such as nonpartisan libertarians—inevitably begin to view their field as one dedicated primarily to ideas, ideology, philosophy, policy, and so forth, and NOT to the emotional, ideologically unmoored cultural passions of a given (and perhaps fleeting) moment. Donald Trump—and more importantly, his supporters, who go all but unmentioned here (Ben Domenech is an exception)—illustrate that that gap is, well, yuuge.

Yes, Trump is nobody’s conservative, but it’s not at all clear that many voters really care about such things. His rise is a rebuke to the stories that political commentators have long told themselves, and to the mores they have long shared even while otherwise disagreeing ideologically with one another. You can despise Donald Trump (and oh Lord I do), and appreciate National Review’s efforts here, while simultaneously wondering whether his forcible removal of a certain journalistic mask might also have some benefit.

I think this is true. As someone who lived and worked in that NY-DC world for years, and who has been in its orbit for longer even than I lived there — for example, I exchange more e-mail with, say, Ross Douthat in a given week than words with my next-door neighbor — I know exactly what Welch means. When I worked at National Review in 2002, I took pride at being part of the team of conservative standard-bearers, and believed that we were articulating what American conservatives felt. This continued after I left NR, but kept up my work as a conservative opinion journalist.

But a funny thing kept happening. When I would go back to south Louisiana to visit my family, I often got into (friendly) arguments with people about conservative principles and policies. I noticed that we were at loggerheads over many things. It frustrated me to no end that reason was useless; “ideologically unmoored cultural passions” weren’t just something, they were the only thing. This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them. To be a conservative is to agree with Us; to disagree with us means you must be a liberal.

I remember getting into it with my dad once after I moved home. I was driving him to the VA clinic for a check-up. This was during the Obamacare debate, and he started complaining about welfare spongers who expected the government to pay for their medical care. I pointed out that he was an avid user of Medicare and of veterans’ medical benefits, and that if not for those government programs, he would have died a long time ago.

“That’s different,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

He just got mad, and changed the subject.

This kind of thing happened more than a few times. Moving back to Louisiana to live really did reveal to me the gap between the conservative punditocracy and those for whom they — for whom we — presume to speak. Ideas and reason matter far less to most people than they do to people like us (this is true of the left as well), not because most people are stupid, but because their mode of experiencing life is not nearly as abstract as ours.

I made fun of myself for this in my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, contrasting myself unfavorably with my late sister. If you had given us both an ice cream cone, I would have been standing there looking at it from all different angles, analyzing the flavors and the texture, while the thing melt down my hand. Ruthie would have just eaten it and gotten on with her business, and thought me a fool for making such a big to-do over ice cream. There’s a lot of value in that approach, but it also blinded my sister to some big-picture realities that had a lot to do with the shape of everyday life, but which were only apparent if you took the time to look more deeply into abstract principles, instead of just going with your gut.

The point I want to make is not that one way is better than the other way — though I do believe as a general matter it’s better to stand on reason and principle than on instinct — but that conservative theoreticians (like me) get so caught up in our ideas that we fail to see some important things, even as many of us tell ourselves, as we have for a generation now, that we are the spokesmen for “real” America.

FIX: So if Trump paints you as part of the establishment, you would resist that label?

LOWRY: We’re not the Republican establishment; we’re conservative. We’re coming at it from a perspective of conservatism. We’re not a business interest. We’re not a donor. We exist outside the system, in that sense, and always have and always will.

I have no doubt in my mind that Rich, who is a very good guy, is being completely sincere here. But come on. Of course National Review is part of the Republican establishment! I don’t say that as a criticism. The American Conservative is not part of that establishment, but I hope one day the ideas we stand for become so popular that they do find champions within the conservative Republican establishment. It’s how you get things done. It’s how you make change happen. If you want to know how the Republican and conservative establishments (a distinction without a lot of difference) think, you read National Review and the Weekly Standard. Again, I underline that this is not a criticism of those magazines, but rather a tribute to their influence in senior circles of the GOP and its constellation of conservative activists.

The problem with this is that you come to think of the interests of your own leadership class — lawmakers, lawyers, think-tankers, journalists, academics — as completely consonant with the interests of American conservatives at the grassroots. In historian Barbara Tuchman’s popular historical study The March of Folly, she writes that the Renaissance popes provoked the Reformation because they couldn’t see how alien they had become to Catholics on the ground:

Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

Conservative elites — GOP leaders, donors, journalists and others — are in the heat of battle now. I certainly understand why they feel that they don’t have the luxury of going all introspective at this moment. But at some point very soon they (again, we) should all ask ourselves why none of us saw Trump coming, and what that says about how out of touch we are with the conservative-leaning people of this country.

Last summer, as my father lay dying, I sat by his hospital bed watching a Trump rally in Mobile with him and my mother. I listened to the things Trump was saying, and thought it was absurd, and surely the American people would wake up to the demagoguery. But my parents liked what he had to say. Trump’s words resonated with their own thoughts and experiences.

You know what? They might have been wrong in their political judgment. I believe they were. The point here is not that my parents were wrong and I was right. The point is that I could not grasp how anybody could believe what Trump was saying. Nobody I knew from my circle of intellectual conservatives could grasp it either. We assumed it would evaporate. And here we are, on the verge of the Iowa caucuses, with Trump poised to sweep to the nomination.

Trump voters may be blind, but so are we who did not see him coming, or foresee the political, economic, and cultural conditions that produced him.

This wouldn’t be the first time the GOP/conservative establishment, with its NY/DC focus, haughtily disdained a populist Republican for veering from orthodoxy. Remember what they did to Mike Huckabee in the ’08 cycle over taxes? Remember “Go Back To Dogpatch, You Stupid Hillbilly”? Again, it wasn’t that they were necessarily wrong about Huckabee, it was the attitude.

From the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.” These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

More:

And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.”

From the perspective of 2016, who was more correct, Frum or Buchanan?

The entire NR article was a slashing rebuke of the paleoconservatives, including those at this magazine. It ended like this:

There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.

But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

You know, I re-read that piece this morning, and I agree with a lot of Frum’s criticism of the paleocons. But the paleos got one big thing right: the catastrophic foolishness of the Iraq War. It would be have been nice in the ensuing fallout to have observed some humility among the conservative elites, a sense that they may actually have no idea at all what’s going on, or what to do about it. It would be nice to see a realization that they (one more time: we, because I too favored the Iraq War) have lost a lot of credibility with ordinary people, whose intense resentment and unappeasable bitterness grows to no small degree from the soil fertilized by the bullsh*t of us conservative elites.

To be clear, I think NR is mostly right about Trump, but I question the prudence of its frontal attack. If I were Trump, I would go to rallies asking out loud just why the magisterial magazine that once dramatically excommunicated conservatives who opposed the Iraq War believes it has standing to excommunicate Donald Trump.

UPDATE: I think reader Borachio has it about right:

As an intellectually serious conservative who supports Trump, I’ll tell you the problem with “intellectually serious conservatism” as practiced on K Street, Wall Street, and the various precincts of power and money:

It’s a pack of lies.

Establishment conservatism is just an ideological smokescreen to camouflage the pauperization and dispossession of the American middle class for the benefit of a kakistocracy at the top and various special-interest client classes at the bottom.

My support for Trump is not based on his being an intellectually serious conservative, which he obviously isn’t.

I’m not sure if Trump can help our country. However, I DO know for sure that none of the establishment-approved candidates will do anything but enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of what is still the American majority.

Trump is our Hail Mary pass, our last desperate attempt to salvage something of what America was before the whirlwind destroys the last of it.

He’s right that Trump is not an intellectually serious conservative. But I have to concede that that might actually be to his benefit. George W. Bush surrounded himself with the wisest Wise Men the Republican Party had to offer … and they got us into Iraq. A well-known Beltway conservative e-mailed today, about Trump, “He’s destroying the GOP and the conservative movement? OK. Who, exactly, was benefitting from them? Not many people.”

After that conversation, I began to ask everyone I met: Do you know anyone who supports Donald Trump? In more cases than not — actually, in nearly all the cases — the answer was no. I asked one woman Friday night, and she said she hadn’t thought about it. I ran into her the next morning at breakfast, and she said, “That was a good question you asked me last night, and I’ve given it some thought.” And no, she didn’t know any Trump supporters.

Given Trump’s big lead in the polls, if so many politically active Republicans don’t know even one Trump supporter, either the polls are wrong or there is some serious GOP Pauline Kaelism at work in the nation’s first primary state.

That’s a reference to the apocryphal legend that the New Yorker film critic said, unironically, “How did Nixon win? I don’t know a soul who voted for him.”

He is? His latest commercial in NH doesn’t even have any words, just a bunch of “Ken Burns effect” pictures white people and barns and old pickups, set to a 50 year old song by something apparently called ‘Simon and Garfunkle’

I remember the picture of John McCain carrying his own suit bag through the airport — his once front running campaign almost extinct. He had backed a “comprehensive” immigration approach (i.e. amnesty) and the voters were having nothing of it. He accepted the message “close the border first” and went on to win the nomination.

And here we are 8 years later, the border as porous as always with so called conservatives talking about a pathway to citizenship and what we are going to do about the millions who are here.

The message, for those too tone deaf to hear it is:

CLOSE THE DAMNED BORDER FIRST

Then you can probably get the American people to look at the millions of neighbors who are here illegally. Americans are a generous people. But don’t try to talk to us about it until the border is closed. We are still bruised there and hitting the bruise hurts.

You people cannot understand the public because you do NOT have the same value system.
Your parents most likely believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Simple is clear. Plain spoken is honest. To the degree that you must embellish your point is the degree to which you are NOT on a direct line of reason. That you cannot simply explain your view tells how muddled or dishonest it truly is. Simplicity in argument is the purest and most trustworthy.
These are things that Trump does. He is clear, simple and direct. None of you wastington people are.

[NFR: I’m not a “Wastington” person, nor am I a Washington person. I live in a small town in the Deep South. Sorry not to be your cartoon. — RD]

Depressing article. When the party of ideas and ideals stops becoming that we are dead. But in some ways it was inevitable when we reduced conservatism to guns, gays,and immigration and took all the harder conversations off the table. Now anyone with a barroom knowledge of politics can be a leader.

Is there anything more narcissistic (even more than Donald Trump) then the self-appoint conservative “intellectual thinkers”. They sound like Edsel salesmen. Grow. Up. You are condescending and insulting to those who work hard and actually produce things. Sneering at the masses from NY and DC can’t win elections in 2016. People are laughing and dismissing the Karl Rove types who allowed the debt to grow to $19T who were by Bush’s side. You are living in a bygone era of bow ties and eating clubs. National Review conservative “thinkers” included a woman currently hawking a beets diet on TV and they guy who convinced middle class people to blow their savings on gold (they lost).

if he also goes after groups that don’t vote, it won’t matter in an election where most people vote based on their own perceptions of their self-interest (albeit rationalized through ideology).

Asians are increasingly voting Democrat. Republicans are not attacking Asians and Democrats race based policies hurt them. But Asians look at the attacks on Muslims and Hispanics and make the decision that bad college entrance requirements is a lesser evil than putting racists who may turn against Asians in charge. So attacks on powerless groups do affect other groups.

In 2004, Thomas Frank wrote a book about my home state called “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” In it he questioned why Kansans of middle to lower economic means always voted Republican and against their economic interests. Frank concluded correctly that Republicans had been able to use cultural and social issues to drive a wedge between these lower middle class voters and their interests. Dreher’s story about his father is a perfect example. In Trump we may be seeing the beginning of the end of this phenomena. Not that Trump has not used issues like religion and immigration to his advantage. It’s just that these voters may finally be waking up to the fact that they have been had economically by these same people.

M_Young, the Sanders “America” ad is wonderful. Those who have’t seen it can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwRiuh1Cug. Rod, I have to say I agree with your Dad about Medicare and the VA being differnt than welfare programs. Medicare is a social insurance system, which recipients have paid into for their entire working lives, and the VA is the least we can do for those who served in the military, IMHO. I don’t say this to attack people who have to avail themselves of Medicaid or other welfare programs, but I think there is a distinction between those programs and the two you mentioned.

“When the party of ideas and ideals stops becoming that we are dead. But in some ways it was inevitable when we reduced conservatism to guns, gays,and immigration and took all the harder conversations off the table.”
True, but ‘elites’ like people who get elected President (how could that person possibly not be included in ‘elites’, no matter how much they pretend otherwise?) always have to strike a balance between doing what’s right for the country and what average people will bear hearing and still vote for them.
I see something of a ‘great men of history’ problem here. I think there could be a conservative leader the right mix of an underlying conservative philosophy who can serve up the right mix of positive inspiration and populist themes to get elected and pursue that conservative philosophy. Instead we have Trump. Too bad for conservatism, and the country.

Here is how it is different. Your dad was forced by the government to pay into Medicare. It is not his fault that the government is running a scam and going broke. Are you implying that because he was scammed, he should give up his rights to those benefits? And when my husband served his country for four year he was promised very little pay even with ‘hazardous duty pay’ , but some benefits upon discharge. He earned what few benefits he got by putting his life on the line, but won’t put it on the line again by using the so-called medical options available to him.

I flatter myself to think that I am an “intellectually serious conservative”. And when Trump’s first threw his hat into the ring, my reaction was similar to that of other “intellectually serious conservative[s]”, as that attitude is described in this article. I assumed, moreover, based on my knowledge of American political history, that the other Republican candidates would very swiftly co-opt the good parts of Trump’s platform, at which point he would fizzle out. I was wrong, and for that reason, I now support Trump. I would like explain why by taking issue with a particular passage from this article:

Really? Was it absurd demagoguery to propose a moratorium on Muslim immigration? After the events of Paris and Cologne, to say nothing of San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon, the Fort Hood shooting, the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber, the shoe bomber, and, lest we forget, September Eleventh, was that really absurd demagoguery? All the other Republican candidates seemed to think so, because they all condemned Trump for proposing it, but the truth is that it is the minimum of common sense.

For that matter, Trump’s immigration proposals in general are just the minimum of common sense, to say nothing of absolutely necessary if either the conservative movement or the Republican Party is going to survive. In case you did not notice, all else being equal, Mitt Romney would have won if this country’s demographics were the same as they had been as recently as 2000. But for immigration, no Democrat, all else being equal, would have won the Presidency since 1976. Apparently, the intellectually serious conservatives are not very serious about the survival of conservatism as a serious force in American politics. But Trump, for all his flaws, is.

[NFR: It’s a shame that you wrote such a long comment, and I spiked it because it’s so filled with stupidity and personal vitriol. I like to think you can do better than that, but I’m probably wrong. — RD]

Great article Rod. You nailed it. I have always considered myself a conservative so of course then, a Republican. But since Boehner and McConnell have had the leads in Congress, I have slowly turned my back to the GOP establishment. And everyday, as I read or watch the news on the establishment’s latest debacle and Trump’s increasing poll numbers, I just keep wondering, “Why don’t you guys get it?”
Thanks for your insight.

For the voters, conservatism is not just a cultural affection (as the writer says) but also a set of economic interests (as his father angrily tried to tell him). Goldwater lost on ideas. Nixon won on culture. Reagan won on culture and economics. The Bushes tried to win solely on culture (remember Dukakis’ ACLU card, the Pledge of Allegiance and Willie Horton in 1988?) and embraced corporate economic ideas that did not suit much of the Reagan coalition, which the Bushes decimated as a result. Trump is again matching culture and economic interest to form a broad coalition.

None of conservatism’s successful episodes have resulted from ideas, and frankly we’d be fools to be voting for ideas that are not in our economic interest. Trump will win because for a Democrat to be pro-immigration and pro-TPP is to be anti-worker and thus a fool.

The spectacle of the Right Wing Noise Machine trying to defeat the Frankenstein base for which it and it alone is entirely responsible for breeding, suckling, catechizing, and raising into the 20 foot tall Monster that is now rampaging across the land is absurd, particularly since the Party of Personal Responsibility has not done jack to accept one single ounce of responsibility for making the Monster. They blame everybody from Obama to Hillary to the Librul Media to reality TV, but they cannot, in the slightest, blame themselves. If they don’t nut up soon and say clearly:

When I declared not my sin, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Selah
I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD”;
then you forgave the guilt of my sin. (Ps 32:3–5).

…then may Trump bring swift and lasting destruction to this party that is now a threat to the US and to the world if this jackass ever acquires nuclear launch codes.

Trump and Sanders say the SAME THING – so do the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

The people are scared. Their physical and economic security is not secure. The economic and foreign policy of the present government have caused this. The immediately previous government ACTUALLY had pretty much the same policies.

Whether globalization and global development will allow America to retain/regain impregnable security and recently-traditional growth rates is debatable. Neither is imaginable under the Bush-Obama sort of policies.

There are good cases to be made for (1) restricting government in so far as possible to defense, justice, currency, infrastructure of universal benefit, and subsidy for the poor;

(2) not expecting any public policy affecting huge numbers of people to be changed, unless it might be changed in a bi-partisan matter over a gradual lengthy schedule;

(3) Resisting involving politics in attempts to change those acts by which people express their values or beliefs or value priorities, and also resisting injecting people’s values or value priorities or beliefs in to politics.

Perhaps the disaffected might go along with that three-point case. I call it “conservatism”.

“But at some point very soon they (again, we) should all ask ourselves why none of us saw Trump coming, and what that says about how out of touch we are with the conservative-leaning people of this country.”

Sam Francis saw it coming and he wrote about it here http://www.unz.org/Pub/Chronicles-1996mar-00012?View=PDF. For such apostasies he and other truth telling intellectuals such as John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, Paul Gottfried and other leading lights of the conservative movement were cashiered by the courtier class, probably at the behest of neocons, in favor of utterly useless, and intellectually insignificant, wastes of space like Jonah Goldberg and Jennifer Rubin (Please, never again refer to this group of scatter-brained nit-wits as intellectuals, they are nothing of the sort). A group within the conservative ‘movement’ set out to destroy conservatism as any kind of a serious intellectual opposition to Leftism and they succeeded. That’s why nobody predicted Trump. There wasn’t anyone with two brains cells to rub together appearing in public forums on behalf of conservatives. And, God forbid, should some such person appear on the scene they’d be denounced or marginalized as fast as possible.

All causes start out as movements, become a business and turn into rackets. Never has that saying illustrated a greater truth than when applied to what passed for conservative intellectualism from the 1990s to the present.

It’s an odd thing I thought would never happen, but the tenor of the anti-Trump faction is so clearly status-quo in opposition to our own on the ground small c conservative interests, that the best argument for him is the dismal array of his enemies, who clearly are ours as well. Thus Trump wins, not so much for what he is himself, but in his visceral opposition and strength to challenge them. Even Greenwald points out the hypocrisy of their opposition to Trump, belied by their own blatant and venal self-interest, that they try to say is no more than good governance in our interest. Sometimes, you must make do with what comes to hand, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the necessary, when you’re justifiably mad as hell and determined not to take it anymore.

We’ve had it up to our ears with the “conservative elites”. All they have gotten us are several lousy Presidents and GOP Senate and House leaders that give the liberals everything they want. Other than making artfully constructed noise, what have conservative leaders done for us? The border doesn’t exist, terrorism is surging and Planned Parenthood is fully funded and unstoppable. Donald Trump may not be your ideal candidate but has directly confronted the real issues you and your ilk should have confronted a long time ago.

[NFR: “Give the liberals everything they want”? I think President Obama would be surprised to learn this. — RD]

I have been playing around for some time on a riff of Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas” to ask “What’s the Matter with Harvard?”

The folks around Kennedy all fought for their country in World War II. They didn’t just talk about their patriotism, they showed it. They were proud of the United States, and they wanted to build her up.

Fast forward to today, and there is hardly any ROTC on an elite university campus. Elites talk about the country as benighted, bigoted. They have sex, drugs, and rock and roll on their brains. If they have faith, it seems to be politically expedient. “Fly-over country” is dismissed as irrelevant.

Someone sitting in a gun shop in Baton Rouge or around a family fire in Charlottesville would sit there and shake their head, and say: “who are these people?” They despise us. They won’t fight for us. They will send out our kids to die for their ideological wars. They will take our money to spend on their voters and their donors. They will put us down, use us, and give us back slogans and pablum.

Whenever an elite gets too disconnected from the base of the country, it loses its legitimacy to lead, and the NY – DC -LA crowd is about as disconnected as they can get. They have basically disenfranchised themselves.

Rich is a good guy. There are a lot of good guys and women in conservative intellectual circles, but they read the same papers, go to the same parties, talk to the same people as their liberal brethren, and they think they have a level of insider knowledge, insight, and intellectual firepower that makes them superior in some way.

What they don’t realize is that they have got to get out of the political echo chamber of mutually reinforcing cocktail parties that they are operating in. While they may have high IQs, they actually are somewhat politically immature and could do with a little humility.

I think the elites in this country are in danger of facing a real crisis of legitimacy, and that rather than being the center of everything, DC, LA, and NY are in serious danger of being marginalized as the country looks for new leadership.

Your Father served in the military and paid into the trust fund for Medicare. Refugees have contributed nothing yet get more.

Letting in a bunch of uneducated, low skilled people who are seeking a free lunch (even if only we pay to keep our cities cleaner and nicer and their home cities don’t or can’t) is not Conservative. The Iraq War wasn’t.

In the middle of Trump’s rise was the swap of Bonior with NR’s darling Paul Ryan. Whatever this “Conservatism” you speak of is, it gave us the Omnibus budget deal. Roberts is supposed to be a “Conservative” justice.

Something that would not be recognized but likely vehemently opposed by Taft, Goldwater, and Reagan can be called “Conservative”, but that is why you don’t understand. At best it no longer has meaning, or has become like the word “Liberal” which at different places and times used to mean “libertarian”, not “socialist”.

“…and intellectually insignificant, wastes of space like Jonah Goldberg and Jennifer Rubin (Please, never again refer to this group of scatter-brained nit-wits as intellectuals, they are nothing of the sort).”

You can say that again. Those two knuckleheads are still defending, and actually promoting, the Bush Doctrine.

They were both still teenagers when Rush hit the national airwaves, and I’m sure that the EIB network is where they both received their ‘conservative’ education.

Re: Letting in a bunch of uneducated, low skilled people who are seeking a free lunch …

Can we please bury this meme? Immigrants of working age come here to work, and they often work quite hard. That’s not reason to welcome then, if we are having problem employing all our own people. I understand that argument. But when you demonize them as lazy welfare bums you lose me and many, many others as well entirely. How about respecting these people’s basic human dignity and not spreading low-blow (and largely false) calumnies against them? Make your argument in cold-blooded economic terms if you think you have a good one.

With respect to NR’s case against Trump, I think we can say that decentralization and federalism are the two main thematic touchstones of limited government. In my view there is no particular reason to think Trump would be bad on either of these, from a conservative perspective. More interesting to me is the threshold test for federalism and decentralization. The test for finding out when those two vital things are being violated ultimately depends (pace C. B. Macpherson) on whether a system of capital diminishes individual liberty when it is separated from labor, as it is in advanced capitalism. If it does, some extent of “countervailing power” is justified. Maybe not as much as John Kenneth Galbraith wanted, but certainly more than Milton Friedman (and presumably Ronald Reagan) wanted. That’s where Donald Trump comes in.

The debate about how far the countervailing power of government should extend should not be equated with limited-government bromides against Trump. Doing so is silly, and potentially dangerous. Why isn’t the “Against Trump” crowd talking about something practically meaningful for Donald Trump’s candidacy, namely the separation of powers?

Where does Donald Trump stand on the separation of powers? Does he think President Truman was right to seize the steel mills because of a purported wartime emergency? Does Trump think Andrew Jackson was right to abolish the National Bank? Was Abraham Lincoln right about “that eminent tribunal,” when he attacked the validity of a Supreme Court decision? (Trump can pick up points with social conservatives on this one, if he gives a solid answer.)

I assume Trump would agree that Barack Obama was wrong to tinker legislatively–and constantly!–with Obamacare to make it “work” both institutionally and politically. From a separation-of-powers perspective, that one is a no-brainer.

“I remember getting into it with my dad once after I moved home. I was driving him to the VA clinic for a check-up. This was during the Obamacare debate, and he started complaining about welfare spongers who expected the government to pay for their medical care. I pointed out that he was an avid user of Medicare and of veterans’ medical benefits, and that if not for those government programs, he would have died a long time ago.

“That’s different,” he said.”

And he was right. Veterans earned their veteran medical benefits and so do seniors after paying decades of ss and medicare taxes.

“-decentralization and federalism are the two main thematic touchstones of limited government. In my view there is no particular reason to think Trump would be bad on either of these, from a conservative perspective”

This is just wishing and hoping. There is no basis to believe more or less anything Trumps says.

He is the Chauncey Gardner of this election. Anyone can invest him with anything, no matter what he says or does, now or in the past. It is remarkable that the ‘Party of Ideas’ is warming up to this.

For many years I have been wondering how Republicans managed to get poor and middle class whites to vote for them, when conservative economic policies ran so counter to their economic needs. I had assumed the strategy was to gin them up over cultural issues so much they wouldn’t notice what was going on. But then I always stumbled over whether it was a coldly and crassly calculated strategy or whether there was an element of obliviousness, generally thinking it was one for some and the other for the rest (not that I understood how obliviousness was possible). For this author, obliviousness seems to fit. I wonder what he thinks, now, of how he has spent the last several decades of his life.

“[Trump] is the Chauncey Gardner of this election. Anyone can invest him with anything, no matter what he says or does, now or in the past.”

Chauncey Gardner–who was really Chance the gardener–was supported by the Big Money political establishment (at the end of the movie)–the very opposite of Trump. His views are his own, and that’s why he should be asked what he thinks about Truman and the steel mills during the Korean War.

The Conservatives said that W Bush was a conservative, but he ran up the deficit by trillions and was not a conservative.

True, a real conservative would have said, Clinton started paying down the debt, but its not going down fast enough, and would have proposed an income tax surcharge dedicated to paying down the debt even faster while fully funding all government expenditures. Bush took one look at a surplus and said “Let’s give the surplus back to the people.” That was rather like taking the family’s mortgage payments for the next four years and blowing them all on a vacation to Hawaii.